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Challenging Global Geographiesof Power: Sending Children backto Nigeria from the United Kingdomfor EducationPAMELA KEA

Anthropology, University of Sussex

KATRIN MAIER

Research Assistant, UK Council for Psychotherapy

The Temne chief Naimbanna [Sierre Leone], recognizing the value of a European train-ing, had sent two of his sons to Britain for schooling in the late eighteenth century. Thisexample was followed by other African rulers, often at the instigation of missionariesand colonial officials who hoped that African princes would serve as agents to plantEuropean ‘civilization’ and Christianity in the Black continent

———Killingray 1993: 7

As early as the sixteenth century, European traders sent a small number of Afri-cans to Britain for schooling in order to secure their support in West Africancoastal trade relations. Throughout the seventeenth century, growingnumbers of Africans attended schools throughout Britain.1 From the eighteenthcentury onward, West African elites used wealth accrued from trade to sendtheir children to Britain for secondary and university educations to supporttheir work in trade and assume official duties integral to the maintenance ofempire (Jenkins 1985; Killingray 1993). At the same time, Britain made use

Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from discussion in the Sussex Centre for AfricanStudies seminar series, November 2015. Many thanks are due to theCSSH editors and the reviewersfor the journal for their incisive comments, and to Jane Cowan for invaluable feedback.

1 Africans have migrated to Britain for hundreds of years, many residing in port cities as slaves,merchants, servants, musicians, entertainers, students, artist models, and in the case of children,playthings of the aristocracy (Costello 2001). But there remain huge gaps in our knowledge ofAfrican migrants to Britain (Adi 2012: 266).

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2017;59(4):818–845.0010-4175/17 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017doi:10.1017/S0010417517000299

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of “good,” educated colonial subjects to sustain the slave trade, spread thegospel, and fulfill the goals of empire (Adi 1998: 7). The 1801 establishmentin Britain of a society for the education of Africans indicates the increasingnumbers migrating there for education (Killingray 1993: 7).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Church of England missionorganizations such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent mis-sionaries to convert local populations throughout the Atlantic World. In thelater eighteenth century, the Society paid for English educations for youngmen in hopes that they would return to their homelands to spread Christianityand “civilization.” One was Philip Quaque, from a comfortable Cape Coastfamily on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and the first African ordained in theChurch of England after the Reformation (Herbstein n.d.). He returned withan English wife to live in Cape Coast. Positioned at the junction of distinct reli-gious and social realms, Quaque faced numerous difficulties in his attempts tobridge these realms by converting the locals to Christianity. Nonetheless, hebecame an influential and prominent figure in Christian missions and thelocal schooling system.2 Quaque’s case highlights the role educational migra-tion played in the (re)production of status (Valentin 2014: 1) and moral worlds,as well as in the making of particular types of subjects within changing cultural,political, and economic conditions.

From the late Victorian period, Britain instituted a policy of allowing itsimperial subjects to enter the country with relative ease, awarding them thesame rights of property, abode, and association as white British citizens, andthis resulted in a growing African presence (Killingray 2012: 393). Many Afri-cans traveling to Britain for education came to improve their lives and furthertheir prospects since they faced enslavement and/or colonial domination intheir home countries. They benefited from British education and the economicand political power of the metropole. For those who came to study, Britainoffered opportunities and respite from colonialism and slavery, but at thesame time subjected Africans to other forms of racism and oppression (Adi2012: 265). As a result, many established networks and formed and joinedassociations, which served as systems of support and refuge. Further, through-out the colonial period these networks were key in supporting and giving voiceto an anti-colonial and anti-racist politics, and the Pan-Africanist movement,which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.: 266). Paradoxically,Britain provided the space from which Africans and those of African descentcould critique the forces responsible for both their presence in Britain andthe racism many suffered. Ultimately, the dissemination of these ideas, inpart through the development from the early twentieth century of vibrantprint cultures, helped to bring about the end of colonization (Bressey and

2 See Philip Quaque 2017.

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Adi 2010: 108). In the postcolonial period, partly in recognition of the impor-tance of education to nation-building and modernization, significant numbersof Africans migrated to Britain. Nigerians and Ghanaians made up thelargest group of overseas students following independence (Bailkin 2009: 88).

The migration of Nigerians to Britain for education, work, or family reuni-fication, among other reasons, is central to postcolonial migratory historicalnarratives (Harris 2006; Olwig and Valentin 2014: 6). West Africans, particu-larly the upper and middle classes, have a long history of investing in theirchildren’s education by sending them to the metropole. Yet, going againstthis long historical grain, some young Britons of West African descent, bornin the UK, are now being sent to West Africa for secondary education (seeBledsoe and Sow 2011). What does this tell us about the types of subjectsthat their families, members of the British West African diaspora, seek toproduce within a changing global political economy?

This article addresses this question through an ethnographic study ofBritish Nigerian families. We offer new insights into the relationshipbetween education, migration, space, emotion, and the production of particulartypes of subjects and subjectivities within neoliberal globalization. We drawfrom 2012 fieldwork carried out for four months in London and one monthin Lagos, Nigeria.3 In both places we conducted one-on-one interviews andalso group discussions. Our interviewees were eight Nigerian-socializedparents, all of them first-generation migrants and either British citizens orlegally resident in the UK; eight children and young adults who had gone toschool in Nigeria while their parents were in the UK, but were now back inthe UK; and fifteen children who were still attending school in Nigeria whileat least one parent was in the UK or the United States. Finally, we also inter-viewed nine close relatives of these children (grandparents, uncles, aunts,and siblings) and several other relevant people such as teachers. In a few excep-tional cases, people we interviewed in London were related to people we laterinterviewed in Nigeria. Here we will focus on three cases in order to providedepth and a stronger sense of the experiences and emotions of those involved,highlighting parents, their children, and in one case, grandparents.

Our interviewees in both the UK and Nigeria can be broadly described asaspiring middle class. We follow Spronk’s (2014: 94–95; see Behrends andLentz 2012) definition, which sees class not as simply a matter of household

3 This pilot project, entitled “Reconfiguring Transnational Care and Education: West AfricanMigrants in the UK,” was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (grant 2008 SRC 114). Thestudy focused on Gambian and Nigerian families. The fieldwork for the “Nigerian Families” sub-project was carried out by Katrin Maier under the supervision of Pamela Kea. Maier, who con-ducted doctoral research on Nigerian Pentecostal churches in London, reactivated contacts fromher previous research and accessed additional informants in London through local secondaryschools, social services, and universities (lecturers and student groups). In Lagos, a local researchassistant (who must remain anonymous) was of invaluable help.

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income (African Development Bank 2011), but as “cultural practice” and an“aspirational category” marked by possession of various forms of capital(Bourdieu 1984; see Coe and Shani 2015). Education, as a form of culturalcapital, has historically served as a key component of middle-class Britishand Nigerian subjectivities. All the parents, relatives, and unrelated “carers”in our study valued education enormously. Several of the parents had attendedboarding school or lived away from their parents in their own childhoods andvalued this positively as a formative experience. Sending children to Nigeria iscostly (fees, travel, board, etc.), and not surprisingly all the parents had jobs andtended to live in middle-class residential areas of London.

The movement of children from the UK to Nigeria is, from the perspec-tives of children, their families, and “carers,” all about the making of good sub-jects (see Fechter 2014) who possess particular dispositions and behave in sucha manner as to ensure educational success, as well as the (re)production ofmiddle-class subjectivities and networks, in a situation of increasing economicprecarity (Sassen 2014). We argue that this movement highlights the way inwhich global geographies of power, rooted in a colony-metropole divide, arebeing challenged and reconfigured—the UK is being “provincialized”through the educational choices that Nigerian parents are making for their chil-dren. Inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty, the term provincialize as used here“means… relocating western narratives of progress in their wider colonial his-tories and rethinking the ‘centre’ by resituating it in its complex web of colonialinterconnections” (Nash 2002: 222; see Arndt 2009). As Nigeria becomes thepreferred destination for educational migration for some British Nigerians, it isrepositioned as the center. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies (Said1978) rooted in colonial histories, and also particular spatial and temporal con-figurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial subjects havetraveled to the metropole for education (see Olwig and Valentin 2014: 3).4

These choices to send children to Nigeria must be understood in relation tothe historical relations that informed the colonial encounter and the emergenceof new relations of domination that are central to neoliberal globalization(Coronil 2000: 352). The latter is characterized by the drive for new formsof “profit-driven extraction” and the emergence of outsourcing sites andglobal cities that house financial institutions and corporations that run extrac-tive industries (Sassen 2014: 9). Constituting a “new geography of centrality,”the matrix of global cities transcends “North-South and East-West divides”(ibid.). This neoliberal logic asserts that “human well-being can best beadvanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills withinan institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights,

4 Similarly, we are cognizant of the continued presence of “non-colonial forms of imperial dom-ination” in which financial capital in the form of loans and foreign aid reproduces imperial geog-raphies of power (Glick Schiller 2005: 443).




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free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2). It has transformed institutions,forms of governance, and “ideas about the self and society” in what has beentermed neoliberal restructuring (Glick Schiller 2011: 214). In the neoliberalworld, workers are expected to continuously reinvent themselves, engagingin a project of the self (Giddens 1991; Foucault 2008: 252–53), developingthe appropriate skills, cultural practices, and dispositions for the neweconomy (Walkerdine 2003: 240). In a context in which profit is based moreon resource extraction than labor, we see decreasing investment in the repro-duction of the labor force. Consequently, following a neoliberal agenda, gov-ernments serve the interests of corporations while cutting back the welfarestate and the costs of social reproduction (Sassen 2014), including state educa-tion. Cuts to education, and the welfare state more broadly, are, in turn, part ofthe neoliberalization of education, which typically includes increased “parentalchoice” and a reframing and promotion of the role of private schooling (Ball2012: 11).

As the international educational market has expanded, Nigerian boardingschools have become a more popular choice among some British Nigerians,and we argue that their appeal is growing as power becomes more rooted incities and regions seen to be growing. Although not a global city, Lagos, amega-city of almost twenty million inhabitants, is the economic powerhouseof the region (Howden 2010). Despite huge income inequalities, a range ofindicators—a growing middle class, the ascent of billionaires, increasinginvestment and trade, and a rising GDP—make Lagos, along with otherAfrican cities such as Nairobi, Accra, and Johannesburg, central players inthe Africa rising narrative. That narrative attributes economic growth to theimplementation of a range of policy measures and good governance reforms(McKenzie 2016).

Yet, this growth, which is generating rising inequalities, is unsustainableand based on profit-driven resource extraction that enriches transnational cor-porations. In the “new scramble for Africa,” this growth is driven by the logicof primitive accumulation that drives neoliberal globalization (ibid.: 3–4). Nev-ertheless, the continued salience of the “Africa rising” narrative has encourageddescendants of Nigerian migrants to the West to return to Nigeria to live inLagos as “repatriates.”5 It is within this situation that many first- andsecond-generation Nigerian migrants to Britain are sending their children tobe educated in Nigeria. We argue, too, that the decision to send children toNigeria is an act of social positioning (Glick Schiller, Basch, andBlanc-Szanton 1992), within changing global geographies of power. It is akey feature of the aspirational strategies of a British Nigerian middle class, ata time when the middle classes are shrinking in Britain (Sassen 2014) but

5 Gilmore 2016.




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are perceived to be growing in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (African Dev-elopment Bank 2011). Within the setting of neoliberal globalization, BritishNigerians now benefit from an elite Nigerian education, the networks this expe-rience gives access to, and potentially, the economic power of the Nigerianstate, formerly conceived within the Western imaginary as a “disenchantedspace” (Chakrabarty 2000).

While the mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006) highlights howsubjectivities are configured through relations with people and places (Conrad-son and McKay 2007: 168; see Berg 2014: 2), anthropological approaches tosubjectivity privilege the “internal life of the subject” (McKay 2008: 382).We suggest that children who are sent to boarding school in Nigeria, andthen back to the UK for school holidays, experience a continual process ofmobility, and subsequently develop transnational lives. Here, mobilitycreates the conditions for the development of new subjectivities and networks,and a transformation of subjectivities. Parents who send their children to board-ing school in Nigeria believe that the experience creates the conditions that aremost conducive to this transformation. We argue that the qualities that arecentral to the good subject embody an idealized conception of a disciplined,well-behaved, polite child, informed by a nostalgic view of Nigerian socializa-tion practices and a firm belief in corporal punishment.

However, because the transnational migrant experience “is inextricablylinked to the changing conditions of global capitalism” (Glick Schiller, Basch,and Blanc-Szanton 1992: 5), the good subject also embodies characteristicsthat are fundamental to contemporary middle-class and neoliberal subjectivities,such as self-discipline, flexibility, time-consciousness, self-inventiveness, self-governance, and so forth.6 Continuous mobility and processes of transformationgive rise to a range of thoughts and emotions and the configuration of translocalsubjectivities (Conradson and McKay 2007: 169)—the “multiply located sensesof self among those who inhabit transnational social fields.” In documenting thenature of children’s mobility and changing subjectivities, we highlight the signifi-cance of emotion in transforming subjectivities, including feelings of privilege,power, and prestige, but also those of abandonment, fear, apprehension, andloneliness.

We first situate our argument within the literature on children, transnation-alism, and educational migration. We then contextualize our account by provid-ing an overview of the changing nature of both education in Nigeria andNigerian migration to the UK. We draw on ethnographic case studies and dis-cussions of parental motivations for sending children to Nigeria for schoolingto argue that such choices must be situated within the context of neoliberalglobalization and cuts to British state education. The former involves the

6 “The neo-liberal subject is the autonomous liberal subject made in the image of the middleclass” (Walkerdine 2003: 239).




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growth of the Nigerian economy and rising levels of prosperity for a smallminority of the population, and this must be juxtaposed with the levels ofpoverty found in the parts of London where many West African migrantsreside or once resided. Finally, we sketch out the types of subjects Nigerianparents seek to produce and the range of emotions and subjectivities thattheir children experience due to their continuous mobility.

C H I L D R E N , T R A N S N AT I O N A L I S M , A N D E D U C AT I O N A L M I G R AT I O N

The rich and growing literature on transnational childhoods and children andmigration increasingly privileges children’s experiences. Topics range fromtransnational care chains, intimacy and connection between parents and chil-dren they leave behind; children who migrate independently; and children ofmigrants who are sent back to the “home” country for education, care, immer-sion in home cultures, and other reasons (e.g., Gardner and Mand 2012; Zeitlyn2014; Qureshi 2014; Orellana et al. 2001; Bledsoe and Sow 2011; Carling,Menjivar, and Schmalzbauer 2012; Coe 2014; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila1997; Parrenas 2005a, 2005b; and Olwig 2012). Research on education andgeographic mobility highlights the role education plays in acquiring culturalcapital and social mobility (e.g., Berg 2014; Olwig and Valentin 2014;Waters 2006).

Much of this literature focuses on the devastating effects of vagabond cap-italism and the intensifying mobility of capital, as parents and children seekingwork are separated from each other and from other loved ones (Katz 2001).Most of those in search of work or education are from the South and travelto wealthier parts of the world (Waters 2006; Olwig and Valentin 2014).Such common trajectories are, as we have seen, rooted in colonial historiesand the allure of particular types of cultural, economic, and symboliccapital.7 With respect to African migrants seeking education in the West, thismovement re-inscribes a familiar first world/third world, developed/developingdichotomy in which Africans are framed solely as migrants and diasporans.When people from the North or wealthier parts of the globe travel for workthey are privileged migrants, transnational elites, or mobile professionals,making informed choices about where they choose to work, study, and live.Both types of mobility are situated within the competing opportunities and con-straints of the global political economy. Yet, despite the similarity, analyticaldistinctions and unquestioned assumptions persist about differences betweenmobile professionals and transnational elites, and migrants and diasporans.These cast a “Eurocentric and class bias” on the literature (Werbner 1999: 17).

7 With reference to East Asian educational migration, Waters maintains, “AWestern education isan essential component of what Mitchell (1997) has described as a ‘self- fashioning’ process, under-taken by East Asia’s transnational middle-class seeking inculcation in the ‘language of the globaleconomic subject’” (2006: 181).




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In fact, such analytical distinctions re-inscribe the global geographies ofpower, rooted in the colony-metropole divide that we critique. In a new geog-raphy of centrality that cuts across North-South, East-West divides, Nigerianparents in the UK make choices, in an educational marketplace, about whereto educate their children (Castles 2010: 1567). Consequently, as transnationalelites, migrants, and members of a Nigerian diaspora, they question assump-tions and break down received distinctions. Nigerian parents who send theirchildren to Nigeria for education must, to be sure, negotiate challenging cir-cumstances by drawing on kinship and familial networks, education, transna-tional orientations, and varying degrees of wealth (Glick Schiller, Basch, andBlanc-Szanton 1992: 4). Yet, as trans-migrants, they are also positioned toengage in a form of prestige migration (Bredeloup 2013: 172).8 This form ofprestige migration is about, not the acquisition of material objects, but ratherthe cultivation of particular characteristics and dispositions. British Nigerianssee acquisition of the latter as a way to improve the status of the individualand the family “in response to the changing social, economic and political con-ditions of a globalizing world” (Huang and Yeoh 2005: 380; see Carling, Men-jivar, and Schmalzbauer 2012).

E D U C AT I O N I N N I G E R I A

Formal Western education in Nigeria today is rooted in British missionary edu-cation, which spread in Southern Nigeria during the colonial period.9 Nyamn-joh (2012: 132) details the powerful sets of relations that emerged oncemissionaries became involved in education, creating an “unprecedented alli-ance between State, Capital and Church” that served to subject and dominatethe bodies and minds of Africans. As part of this, once Christian missionaryschooling was introduced in Nigeria in the mid-nineteenth century, corporalpunishment came to be used in both mission and state schools (Last 2000: 362).

The 1960s into the mid-1980s saw an expansion of state education—secular, Christian, and Muslim—and, in the 1970s, the establishment offederal colleges as a way to extend education to the masses (Peil 1982: 159).Also after independence, entrepreneurs began to establish for-profit schools(Rose and Adelabu 2007: 71). The implementation of structural adjustmentpolicies in 1986 resulted in a rapid contraction in educational resourcing andprovision, which generated decreased standards and brought about a crisis inthe educational system (Nwagwu 1997). Disenchanted with state education,many parents of students at both primary and secondary levels turned to the

8 Historically, those involved in prestige migration within West Africa were seen as adventurersin pursuit of material wealth (Bredeloup 2013).

9 Lord Lugard, British governor of Nigeria from 1914 to 1919, greatly admired the Hausa-Fulanihierarchical social structure in Northern Nigeria and described them as more developed than“tribes” of Southern Nigeria. Consequently, as part of attempts to “develop” the latter, missionaryeducational activity was greater in the south (Chukunta 1978: 69–70).




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burgeoning private school sector (Ogunsanya and Thomas 2004: 80). Signifi-cantly, the latter’s clientele now include local Nigerians as well as the childrenof expatriate Nigerians (Harma 2013). Tapping into the heritage and culturallegacy market, a wide variety of private schools began competing to woo thebest students by targeting expatriate Nigerians through websites, open days,and marketing campaigns. Prospective students take their entrance exams inthe UK.10

Such educational choice must be understood within a Nigerian politicaleconomy with huge inequalities between the rich and poor (Give Yourself2014).11 Nigeria has Africa’s largest economy and is the world’s seventh-largest oil producer.12 Inequality can be traced largely to years of rule by themilitary, which effectively pillaged the economy (Smith 2001: 804). Yet,private schools in Nigeria do not simply cater to the wealthy. In a calculatedbid for social mobility and the status and networks that education offers,some poorer families with few resources sacrifice to send their children tocheaper private schools (Ogunsanya and Thomas 2004; see Binaisa 2013:890; Last 2000: 362). Most private schools are entirely self-financing, andthough they must be registered and the government recognizes their status,they operate independently from the government (Harma 2013: 548). Pricesfor private schools range widely, with cheaper schools attracting poorer Niger-ians, particularly in Lagos state, where “12,098 private schools cater to 57% ofthe state’s enrolled children.”13 A child may be fostered to relatives who arebetter educated than the parents in the belief that the child’s prospects willbe improved by the adopters’ education and professional status (e.g., as abanker, teacher, or government official).14 In this sense, geographic mobilityfor education, whether local or transnational, is seen as key to ensuringsocial mobility and fulfilling an array of other aspirations (Brooks andEverett 2008).

N I G E R I A N M I G R AT I O N T O T H E U K AND T H E P O L I T I C S O F E D U C AT I O N

An estimated ninety-eight thousand UK residents were born in Nigeria, makingthem the second-largest group from Africa and the tenth largest out of all

10 The literature on the burgeoning international education market concentrates mostly on highereducation in Western countries (e.g., Waters 2006: 180; King and Ruiz-Gelices 2003; Olwig andValentin 2014). Less has been written about private schools and higher education in countries inthe south.

11 See, for instance, websites such as Burleigh 2014.12 Oil “accounts for about 40% of the Gross Domestic Product and 70% of government reve-

nues” (Ikelegbe 2005: 208).13 Costs for elite private boarding schools vary from US$4,000 to $20,000 for fees alone (Expat

Arrivals n.d.).14 Fosterage, in which children are entrusted to relatives or friends in order to affirm relations, as

an additional source of labor, and to enable children to attend school and acquire additional skills, isa common practice throughout West Africa (Goody 1982).




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immigrant nationalities (Matheson 2010: 17). Most of them live in GreaterLondon, and the majority is of Yoruba descent and/or grew up in Lagos,which is dominated largely by Yoruba. Nigerians in the UK are Muslims orChristians, and there is a vibrant landscape of Nigerian-dominated Pentecostalchurches there.

Most of the many Nigerians who have migrated to the UK since the 1950shave come for education. Those who migrated in the 1950s expected to returnto an independent Nigeria (Nigeria gained independence in 1960) (Harris 2006:23). Wives of such students often supported their husbands by working low-paying jobs (ibid.: 30); due to financial pressures on parents, children weresometimes left behind in Nigeria, or sent home, but some were fostered outto white British families so that their parents could study and/or work(Goody and Groothius 2007). The importance placed on education has notdiminished among the many educated middle-class professionals and entrepre-neurs who have come to the UK since Nigeria’s mid-1980s economic crisis.

As Nigerians have become structurally and financially stronger in the UK,they have become more transnationally mobile. In this sense, they have formed“multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, encompassing thosewho move and those who stay behind” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004:1003, our emphasis; see also Glick Schiller 2005). Within the current periodof neoliberal globalization, many people are subjected to precarious workingconditions and various forms of social protection are becoming the preserveof “highly skilled workers, corporate capital, or those with inherited wealth”(Gill 1995: 401). Consequently, in the transnational social field that Maierand Coleman (2011: 453) call “London-Lagos,” children move in order toobtain an adequate education, networks, and cultural dispositions that willhelp give them the best start in life (see MacGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga2000).

Decisions to send children to Nigeria have been strongly influenced byeducational cuts and increasing privatization, which have brought aboutseismic changes in the nature and quality of state education in the UK (Ball2012: 2). The growth of neoliberal policy has brought enhanced competition,in which schools’ achievements are measured by a range of performance indi-cators. Such policies have (re)produced existing racial- and class-basedinequalities as schools seek to attract the strongest students within aperformance-led environment (Apple 2001: 413; Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz1994). As performance indicators are published in public league tables, thoseschools that perform well are rewarded. They, in turn, try to attract studentswho can contribute to their school’s strong performance in the league tablesor are seen to have the potential to do so. This results in “the reinforcementof intensely competitive structures of mobility both within and outside theschool” (Apple 2001: 410).




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It is widely recognized that the middle classes are better positioned tomanipulate this system to their advantage (ibid.: 414). Although British Nige-rian parents in this study are middle class, their class-based experiences aremediated by race (Gilborn 2008), gender, and in the case of first-generationmigrants, their migratory status. Many criticize the British state educationalsystem for their children’s poor educational experiences, the low expectationsthat teachers had of their students, and the way in which racism within schoolsled to different educational outcomes for different groups of students (Stevens2007: 171). They felt that the system did not instill the requisite levels of ambi-tion in their children (see Bledsoe and Sow 2011: 8). Such dissatisfactionsencourage some parents to either send their children to a boarding school inWest Africa or, as a first measure for those who can afford it, to a privateschool in the UK. By drawing on transnational opportunities, they makeboth themselves and their children less vulnerable to potential racism and tothe inadequacies of the British educational system (Glick Schiller, Basch,and Blanc-Szanton 1992: 9).

D I S C I P L I N E A N D T H E MAK I N G O F G O O D S U B J E C T S

High-end boarding schools in Nigeria can be a means to deal with a financiallyand morally challenging UK environment, and can also result in ongoing inter-generational tensions within families, as the following case illustrates. Patiencepreviously went to a private school in Croydon, South London before attendingboarding school in Nigeria from the age of fourteen. She underperformed at herschool in Croydon, forgetting books at home and showing general disorganiza-tion in her daily routine. Prior to this the family had negative experiences ofstate education of their children. Yet Patience was the only one of her siblingsto be sent to Nigeria, because of her lack of self-discipline. Her parents andteachers felt she needed the structured and regulated routine that a boardingschool environment would offer because both parents were working and feltunable to “micromanage” Patience’s life. Inspired by other African parentswho had sent their children to boarding schools in Zimbabwe, Ghana, andNigeria, Patience’s parents looked at a range of schools in Nigeria and optedfor a high-end, internationally oriented, single-sex secondary boarding schoolin Lagos.15

Sending children to Nigeria for schooling is part of a transnational, collec-tive endeavor—involving parents, extended family, teachers, and peers withinboarding schools—to produce particular types of subjects and networks thatfacilitate success (Cohen 1981). In this sense, these moral and aspirational pro-jects involve not only immediate family members but also key actors within the

15 Even with the high costs of regular travel between London and Lagos, fees, general expenses,and paying chauffeurs, the boarding school in Nigeria proved to be cheaper than the private dayschool Patience attended in her south London suburb.




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Nigerian educational and social world (see Carling, Menjivar, and Schmalzba-uer 2012).16 For instance, parents may consult grandparents or other relatives athome, explaining the needs of the child and of the parents, and the nature ofintergenerational tensions between them. Grandparents and relatives involvedin the care and emotional support of children who have been sent back oftenbenefit from parental financial contributions as well as the affirmation of trans-national kinship relations.

Alternatively, pressure to send a child to Nigeria may come from relativesthere. In one case, a girl’s Lagos-based maternal grandparents had repeatedlyasked for her to be sent to school in Nigeria. They thought that when theyvisited London she had displayed a severe lack of “respect for her elders”(parents, grandparents, and other adults). They were concerned that British edu-cation and society were not teaching her the “Yoruba culture” of respect andobedience and that this would get her into trouble. The girl was sent to a Nige-rian boarding school and has been under the guardianship of her grandparentsfor the past four years. Similarly, Patience is supported and cared for by rela-tives in Benin and Lagos who she visits during school breaks. In most cases,trusted family relations have facilitated logistics and worked to meet the emo-tional needs of children who have been sent to Nigeria.

That said, Patience’s move to Nigeria was not without emotional cost toher mother Mary and the rest of the family. “Oh, it was hard. I cried thatday. You know? Even I broke down crying because.… And you couldalways think, ‘What have I done?’… And, er, to have been put in that position,you know, where we have had to put her into a school abroad, I think it wasquite hard.”17 The family felt they had to put on hold certain events and occa-sions because Patience was not there. “We are not complete. My husbandwould say ‘no’ if we were planning anything, ‘not until she comes back.’”This sense of waiting for Patience’s return highlights the feelings of loss anddeep emotional cost entailed in sending a child to Nigeria. Yet, these mixedemotions help to promote and guide conduct: Mary was adamant that only ina boarding school environment could Patience acquire the skills and culturaldispositions that she needed, learning to be polite, organized, independent, edu-cated, time-conscious, and well-mannered. Mary used terms such as “organiza-tion,” “respect,” and “regimental,” and adamantly claimed that Patience neededto learn “that things have to be done at a certain time, in a certain way, and in acertain manner.”

These dispositions and qualities speak to Nigerian conceptions of the goodchild, which are partly informed by culturally specific notions of what it means

16 Often enquiries are made with schools, relatives, and friends within transnational social net-works. Sometimes the plans are dismissed; families may determine that the schools are inadequate,or sometimes there are no relatives or friends available to act as the child’s guardian in Nigeria.

17 All quotations from Mary are from a May 2012 interview at her London home.




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to be educated (Levinson and Holland 1996). The latter are rooted in nostalgicaccounts of the ethos of Nigerian education, prior to the introduction of colonialeducation, which emphasized the group, “respect for elders and those in posi-tions of authority,” an appreciation of “cultural heritage,” and the developmentof the intellect and “character” (Obiakor 1998: 59). In addition to exposing theirchildren to Nigerian society, parents who send their children to boarding schoolthere seek to inculcate desirable behavior by immersing them in a particularmoral world and its disciplinary regime. In so doing, they create a moralmirror against which they judge and provincialize British society and its defi-ciencies, as Mary explained:

Nigeria has a way of molding them.… Discipline in Nigeria is much more spot-on thanwhat we have here.… But you see, in schools, even though they call them ajebota (rich,spoiled kids who eat butter18) … they still flog them. They discipline them very well ifthey misbehave. The way they brought them up here is that the child can walk past youand they won’t even look at you. But at [the school Patience attends in Nigeria] you’dhave to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening.… They expect them torespect them … all those traditional things that probably did exist in the UK in thepast, but no longer exist at schools today.

Mary emphasizes the importance of corporal punishment in childrearing andthe making of good children in Nigeria, a practice meted out to unruly childrenregardless of class affiliation. This view was echoed by one of our interlocutorsin Nigeria, an elderly Baptist Reverend who, with his wife, had cared for theirgranddaughter while she went to school there. He claimed that the only way toease intergenerational frictions between parents and children is to send the latterback to Nigeria for training, without which it is difficult to instill in children arespect for elders: “In England if you beat your child, for this reason or another,they call it child abuse. In this country [Nigeria] it is ‘training!’”19 His beliefs,like those of Mary and other parents, reveal the Nigerian diaspora’s ambivalent,hesitant, and fraught relationship with the British state, in which the latter isseen to dictate appropriate childrearing practices through child protection mea-sures, and thereby undermine Nigerian parenting strategies (Maier andColeman 2011; McGregor 2008; DeLoach and Gottlieb 2000; Carling, Menji-var, and Schmalzbauer 2012).20 Indeed, many parents feel that the problemsand protracted crises they face in their relationships with their children stempartly from state education and flaws in British society (a lack of discipline,

18 The ability to “eat butter” symbolizes a particular level of wealth and privilege.19 Corporal punishment in British schools has been illegal since 1987, but striking children is

still permitted in homes. Booklets such as Manual on Child Protection for African Parents inthe UK (2012), directed at the African diasporic community, attempt to prevent abuse toward chil-dren while offering childrearing support and guidance.

20 At an evening parenting class in a big Nigerian-led Pentecostal church in London, Nigerianparents expressed their sense that they are disempowered by the state and by legislation that restrictstheir ability to discipline their children as they would like to.




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moral values, and respect for elders), rather than from their own parentingmethods.

Mary harks back to a period in Britain’s past when, it is alleged, corporalpunishment in schools and homes was common practice and children showedrespect for adults. Ironically, the methods used to instill respect, new habits, anda work ethic in the Nigerian educational setting are informed by the British edu-cational colonial legacy of discipline through corporal punishment. OnceChristian missionary schooling was introduced in Nigeria in the mid-nineteenthcentury, corporal punishment was used in both mission and state schools. Thelimited literature on the topic maintains that beatings and corporal punishmentwere less common in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa prior to the colonialperiod (Emy 1972: 128–35; see Sulaiman 2012). Although beatings did takeplace, they were often inflicted by other family members or as part of initiationpractices (La Fontaine 1986: 98).

Within both mission and state schools, physical punishment was central tothe civilizing mission of British colonial educational policy and colonialmodernity, in which physical punishment became associated with being civi-lized and modern. Consequently, those who beat children came to be seen ascivilized while those who did not were “backward” (Last 2000: 359–86).21

“Legitimacy accrued to beating primarily by virtue of it being a particularlyEuropean practice” (ibid.: 362; see Pierce 2001). By sending Patience backto Nigeria, Mary actively bypassed British legislation and assumed a positionof moral superiority vis-à-vis the UK, yet she also affirmed disciplinary prac-tices rooted in a colonial modernity, which she felt were central to the makingof a good child. She associated these practices with greater legitimacy since shedrew on nostalgic representations of Victorian childrearing strategies andreworked historically sedimented practices to suit her current, immediate needs.

Despite Mary’s strong and clear ideas about appropriate childrearing prac-tices and the use of physical punishment to teach desired behavior, she readilyadmitted that she did not have the time to socialize Patience accordingly: “Theschool in effect is doing what I should have been doing.… They are doing it.Allowing me to have the easy part of it.” As part of its relationship with fee-paying clients, the elite school Patience attends in Nigeria takes the lead inworking to change Patience into a disciplined, well-mannered child througha time-tabled rigor of daily routines, a regime of punctuality, academic achieve-ment, and an abiding appreciation for education. As the school takes on a full-time role in this project of transformation, Patience feels compelled to become a

21 The non-Muslim Hausa generally do not beat their children, who are likened to visitors andare part of a spirit world. In a situation of high infant mortality, parents need to encourage theirchildren to stay: a departure is equated with death and return to that spirit world (Last 2000:368; Gottlieb 1998; 2004; Okri 1991).




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good subject and manage the range of emotions that schooling in Nigeriaevokes.

Through processes of subjectification and self-formation (Foucault 1977)people actively turn themselves into subjects. Following Foucault’s threemodes of objectification of the subject, the third and most significant, subjecti-fication, highlights the practices and techniques that are central to the process ofself-formation. As children self-govern and self-regulate, they become particu-lar types of subjects. In Patience’s case this process involves a range of disci-plinary measures enforced by teachers, relatives, parents, peers, and thechildren themselves. Patience is actively engaged in self-making, and is alsobeing made through culturally specific regimes of family- and school-baseddiscipline, punishment, and training (see Mahmood 2005). She describes indetail the regimented routine and the importance of obedience in the boardingschool’s culture. “You are in Nigeria. We have a certain time to do certainthings.… I had to be ready to just be that orderly person. It was veryhard.”22 Patience had to perform the role of an obedient and well-manneredyoung woman, negating feelings of distress and anxiety. She described the feel-ings of loss and emotional breakdown she experienced when her mother placedher in the school and left her for the first time.

Sitting in her living room in a South London suburb, having undergone a“successful” transformation, Patience claims to be much happier now, prefer-ring “the person I am now to the person I was before.” Yet, even now, athome on holiday, her feelings of loss and incompleteness return when sheponders the prospect of going back to school in Lagos. Subjected to the “dis-ciplinary power of uncertainty” (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury 2016: 604) thatdistinguishes neoliberal subjectivities, Patience is engaged in a continualprocess of self-improvement and self-formation: “I just don’t want to leavemy family. I feel like this all the time, every time I go back. Every time I go,pieces of me will just … any time I am walking through the gate at theairport, pieces are just dropped, they are just left behind.… I have nothing. Idon’t have anybody around me anymore. I hate going back. But when I getthere, it will all change.”

As Patience leaves her family to return to school she loses pieces ofherself, pieces that she must, through a labored performance, work to replaceand transform in her boarding school environment. As she moves from oneplace to the other—from home, to the airport lounge, the airplane, the chauf-feured car in Lagos, and finally to the confines of the school—she strugglesto locate and (re)place herself in these diverse settings. Over time Patiencedraws on and generates diverse translocal subjectivities informed by a rangeof emotional states, as well as a range of geographic spaces. “Nigeria has

22 All quotations from Patience are from a May 2012, interview at her London home.




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changed me, it really has.… Even though I don’t want to admit it sometimes,but it has helped me. I am a better person.”When Patience moves from Londonto Lagos, the “calm” atmosphere of the school and its surroundings makes herfeel as if she is back in the UK. Her movement from London to the enclosed,bubble-like world of the elite school, with its green courtyard and strutting pea-cocks, locked in by firmly guarded iron gates, as well as the relations in bothplaces, are central features of her transformation. Here, geographic and tempo-ral mobility is central to the emergence of Patience’s varied translocalsubjectivities.

S O C I A L P O S I T I O N I N G A N D T H E P R O D U C T I O N O F P R I V I L E G E D

S U B J E C T S

The transformative power of mobility in fashioning privileged subjects is cap-tured in the following accounts of the Olaju family.23 They live in one of thecommuter towns to the northwest of London. Rose and Ola, the parents, senttheir elder daughters, Bola, Tolu, and Ayo, back to Nigeria for a number ofyears and plan to send their youngest daughter Kemi in a few years.Twenty-one years ago they lived in Peckham, a part of South London notoriousfor high crime levels, and they decided at the time that they would send theirchildren to school in Nigeria before secondary school. Their case differsfrom that of Patience’s family in the sense that education in Nigeria is a partof this family’s normal practice. All their girls knew from a young age thatthey would be sent to Nigeria, and unlike Patience, they had little choice inthe matter. Ola was keen to convey that if things did not work out for thegirls they could always return: “It’s not do or die. We can always bring themback.” In the interview it seemed that this was as much a comfort to theparents as to the girls. However, Rose and Ola felt strongly that because theyboth worked they were in no position to instill the necessary respect, morals,and cultural dispositions in their daughters or protect them from “the thieves[and] bad habits” in the area.

Much of the literature on parents’motivations for sending children to theirhome countries for education, in addition to highlighting the import of affirm-ing cultural heritage, stresses the perceived need to discipline children andprotect them from urban cultures of danger and immorality (Bledsoe andSow 2011; Mazzucato and Schans 2011; Qureshi 2014). Nigerian parentsrefer to the crime and troubles that plague children living and attendingschool in deprived parts of inner city London, such as Peckham, and they high-light the “relationships between ethnicity, poverty and space” (Hall 2015: 26)that exist in the urban landscape.

23 All quotations from the Olaju family are from May and June 2012 interviews at their Londonhome.




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Rose describes Peckham—known as “Little Lagos” because of the manyNigerians who live there (Barber 2013: 168)—as one of the worst places tobring up children. Drawing on the familiar trope of urban decay and moral col-lapse, Ola recounts how some friends who chose not to send their children toNigeria once returned home from work to find the police at their house, andguns under their children’s beds, features of the violent landscape that, fromhis perspective, exemplify poorer parts of London. Moving to the more pros-perous surrounds of suburban London was a first step in protecting their chil-dren from the dark underbelly of urban life, and getting them a good educationwas the second. Both Ola and Rose emphasize the importance of education as asign of social status: “In Nigeria, it is something you have to do if you don’twant to be looked down upon. You need to go to school; you need to go to uni-versity. If not, you get looked down upon by everybody, because you are moreor less like a downtrodden person, somebody not to be reckoned with.”

Rose and Ola work hard to position their daughters in an environment inwhich they will develop the cultural dispositions, skills, transnational orienta-tions, and networks necessary to succeed in a changing, global politicaleconomy. Such cultural dispositions and transnational orientations, ideally,encourage those who have been educated in Nigeria to adopt a globaloutlook. For instance, Bola maintains, “I would go to Nigeria again. Any-where.… I mean there was a point when I was thinking of going to Chinafor a bit. To work. Yeah. I would go where the money is. And I definitelythink that [being in Nigeria] did help.” Given rising levels of economic precar-ity and enhanced competition for social mobility, “network building” (Portesand Walton 1981: 60) with elite Nigerians both in Nigeria and in the UK isever more necessary to the (re)production of middle-class, neoliberal subjectiv-ities. The girls and other informants talked about new friendships they hadformed with Nigerian girls and other British Nigerian girls who had beensent to Nigeria for education and were now back in the UK.

Similarly, Rose and Ola held strong ideas, rooted in a diasporic imaginary(Berg 2009: 267), about the need for their daughters to learn about strugglewhile at school in Nigeria. They were keen to ensure that the girls werenever complacent about their privileged lives and the material comforts theyenjoyed in the UK. A return to Nigeria would, it was hoped, expose them tohaving to struggle but also serve as an act of social positioning. Yet, there isa clear discrepancy between what they felt their daughters would achieve inNigeria and what their daughters thought they had learned. The following inter-view extract illustrates this:

Katrin: And then, maybe you two [the two older daughters, twenty-one and nineteen]can respond to that … when you are in Lagos and you get into the gates of the board-ing school, there is a very big sense that it’s a very good school. It’s very clean, it’svery tidy. In Nigeria, being part of [that school] you actually get a sense that you areprivileged.




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Daughter 1: I would say absolutely!Daughter 2: I agree!Daughter 1: And I know where they [their parents] are coming from in terms of, “Ok,you see these kids, you know, hawking…,” but it’s actually not. The school they sentus to, it did make us feel bigger. It’s a school full of snobs if I can be frank! And ifyou go to a school where your friend is the daughter of a senator and you are goingto their house and they have swimming pool-s—you know, plural!—and huge housesand we are in these air conditioned cars and we are driven by drivers … half of thetime this whole thing of seeing those kids [poor children hawking in the streets ofLagos]: you are not looking outside the window! You are sleeping because you are inthis really cushiony air conditioned car…. The idea of “don’t be complacent because,you know, it costs money to pay for electricity and water” … but we were at a schoolwhere as soon as the power cuts, the generator is on…. And there are no times whenthere is no water. I can count on my hand how many times something happened thatwent wrong and there was no water.24

In trying to make sense of their Nigerian schooling experience, the girls rely onoft-repeated narratives to guide them, finding comfort in their familiarity. Con-firming Patience’s account of life in a boarding school in Lagos as distinct andseparate from the experience of ordinary Nigerians, Bola likens the school toEton, describing the wealth of the Nigerian girls who attended: many hadseveral swimming pools and air conditioned, chauffeured cars and tookannual holidays to Europe. In the fashioning of new translocal subjectivities,Bola and her sisters are immersed in a space occupied largely by the Nigerianprivileged elite, which is considerably more affluent than the one they inhabit insuburban London. Within this space, Bola and her sisters participate, albeittemporarily, in a world of wealth and privilege. Their social position as elitesis generated and affirmed within the space of their Nigerian boarding school.

Bola was initially blind to the poverty of Nigeria, and in a direct challengeto her parents’ views, she maintains, “I think it’s here [in the UK] that we havelearned … about struggle. It wasn’t until I got back here that I started to seethings.” This statement speaks to the relatively moderate living conditions ofmany Nigerian migrants in London and some of those involved in this research,as well as to the disparities in wealth and extremes of poverty and hardship thatmany face. It took Bola four years, when she had returned to Nigeria for aholiday, to realize that poverty was a central feature of the Nigerian landscapeas well. “But because of the situation I was in [at boarding school] I was nevergonna see it!” Her parents had expected that life in Nigeria would make theirchildren value the material comforts they had in the UK. However, Bola asso-ciates struggle and poverty with life in London, and opulence and comfort withher life in Nigeria. This highlights the changing nature of global geographies ofpower, in which British-Nigerians, in a form of prestige migration, areimmersed in a world of wealth and material comfort in their elite Nigerian

24 Family interview, London, 21 Aug. 2012.




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boarding school. As they embrace their translocal subjectivities, their sense ofnational belonging becomes more fluid. Tolu described her own situation: “Idon’t really have ties anywhere. I don’t really feel I am fully Nigerian, Idon’t feel I am British, I just … you know? I don’t think nationality is reallymy … it’s not a big deal to me because I have had it both ways and eitherplace I fit in properly.”

Nonetheless, the girls still affirm their Britishness in Nigeria. Surroundedby wealth and privilege in the hidden confines of boarding school life, they areaccorded status because of their Britishness, a key attribute in the developmentof elite networks. The girls also “keep their options open” by drawing on thesymbolic and cultural capital of their Britishness in Nigeria and converting itinto social capital in the form of extensive networks, and economic capital interms of university prospects and future jobs once they are back in the UK(see Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992: 12).25 And yet, some chil-dren return from Nigeria bitter and angry about the experience, as in Joseph’scase, to which we now turn.

R E S I S TA N C E A N D T H E MAK I N G O F V U L N E R A B L E S U B J E C T S

Although many children are given a choice as to whether to go to school inNigeria, some, positioned as pawns, are forced to go. In fact, they are highlymobile precisely because they adhere to adults’ authority and reluctantlyfollow their dictates (see Olwig 2012: 936). Joseph was born and brought upin South London in a small Victorian house. Although his mother was not sowell off as the families of Patience and the Olaju daughters, she was comfort-able enough to be able to send him to Nigeria for secondary schooling from histhirteenth to eighteenth years. Unlike the girls, Joseph did not return for visits toBritain during school holidays because his mother could not afford regularreturn trips, nor did she visit him in Nigeria. This no doubt contributed to hisfeelings of abandonment, loneliness, and negativity.

He is now in London, living on his own, although one of his brothers occa-sionally stays at the house with him. He studies art and fashion at a local collegeand works at a clothing shop. Unlike the other interlocutors, Joseph’s accountabout this time in Nigeria is particularly bitter, because his mother died justbefore his return to London. Consequently, despite having four siblings inLondon, all of whom are married, he feels very much on his own andconveys a sense of disappointment in people generally. During the interview,as well as having a headache and feeling under the weather, Joseph gave theimpression he was irritated by the questions, no doubt because they evoked

25 One young woman who had been sent back commented that the more elite schools in Nigeriaoften have a non-Nigerian principal. “The parents see that the schools here are actually better, so ifsomeone from here goes there, he’s gonna bring that mentality that is in the UK to Nigeria” (seeNyamnjoh 2012: 139).




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painful and unpleasant memories. At times he paused and hung his head,exposing a profound vulnerability.

Joseph claimed to have trusted his mother’s decision to send him toNigeria, and confirmed that he was “misbehaving.… I wasn’t doing well inschool,” yet his sense of abandonment was silently conveyed through hisbody language and frequent pauses in his accounts of life in Nigeria. Yet, tomake sense of his mother’s decision, Joseph claimed that he had been difficultand that his mother had no choice but to send him to Lagos against his will. “Iwasn’t acting up to my mum’s standards. I was getting in a lot of trouble.” Inthis sense, he was very different from his siblings. As well as misbehaving athome, which caused ongoing conflict between himself and his mother,Joseph was excluded from school. The friends and sisters of boys who hadbeen sent to Nigeria for education maintained that boys had more unpleasantand traumatizing experiences in Nigeria than did their female counterparts.They were treated more harshly than the girls, partly because they had oftenbeen “in trouble” in London before being sent to Nigeria, and had oftenbeen sent against their will. His mother, a single parent, clearly could notcope with his behavior, and so she decided to take him to Nigeria.

When Joseph’s mother told him that he was going to go to school inNigeria, he was shocked, as he conveyed in a state of disbelief: “I didn’tbelieve her until I proper got put into the school, the boarding school. So, Ididn’t proper believe it. I thought it was just a joke to try to scare me.… Shejust left me there.” It is common for parents to threaten to send childrenback to their home countries without ever actually doing so, instilling fear asa way to address disciplinary issues (Orellana et al. 2001: 583; see Ellis1978: 49). Yet, his mother clearly was unsure of her decision, underscoringthe sense of uncertainty that many parents feel in making such decisions:“My mum called me every week … sometimes twice a week … she wasvery worried about me all the time. You can imagine leaving your own last-born child in another country. It’s hard.”

Despite understanding his mother’s motivations, Joseph was reluctant tothink about his time in Nigeria: “I don’t really want to think about it becausewhen I start to think about it, I will start getting upset. Don’t want to thinkabout it at all.… I just keep it to myself.” Similarly to the other interviewees,though, his time in Nigeria instilled in him a strong sense of discipline, hardwork, and respect for his elders: “If you don’t learn them you get forced tolearn them. You get hit or you get punished.… You just have to obey, youdon’t have the choice.… If you don’t work, if you’re lazy, if you’re rude, what-ever you do that’s bad, if you do it over there, they will beat you with a stickcalled a cane. Or some big cord.… You have to respect your elders. That is thefirst rule.”

Likening his punishment to a form of abuse, Joseph sighed, conveying asense of fatigue and resignation. As he was subjected to the school’s authority




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as well as that of his mother, he felt there was no space for resistance (seeGardner 2012: 898). Yet, by negating his experiences of life in Nigeria,expressed through his reluctance to think and talk about his time spent there,he gave the impression of resisting through his strategic use of memory (Fou-cault 1977).

In this sense, Joseph’s experiences clearly highlight the way in whichthese projects of transformation, in which children are sent back for schoolingin order to experience Nigerian socialization practices and to develop good,neoliberal subjectivities, are rarely seamless and, in some cases, are extremelydifficult. Apprehensive about the potential negative side effects of sending theirchildren to Nigeria, some parents choose to keep them at home, thinking theywill fare better in the UK. Alternatively, they compromise and visit Nigeria on aregular basis with their children. Joseph maintained that he would never sendhis own children there: “I don’t wanna keep in touch with nobody fromNigeria! I want to move on because I don’t want to think about it.… I don’twant to talk to anyone from Nigeria. I am done with that. I have sufferedenough.” Joseph’s negation of his time spent in Nigeria as well as all thingsNigerian, compared to Patience’s active involvement in the decision to sendher to Nigeria and her experience of positive transformation, demonstratesthe importance of choice and negotiation in decisions to send children backto the home country. Joseph associated mobility and Nigeria with trauma andloss. His feelings of abandonment and loneliness were compounded becausehis mother passed away: “My life is hard. My life is not easy.… So, I amjust surviving, just on my own.”

Some of the children who are sent back to their parents’ home countriesare seen by their parents or relatives to be unruly, ill mannered, and lackingin discipline (see Orellana et al. 2001) and valued cultural dispositions.Others are presented as fragile subjects who are vulnerable to the culture ofdanger that defines the neighborhoods and wider urban settings in whichthey live, with their drugs, racism, gang culture, violence, sexual license,truancy, educational failure, and so forth. Yet, though Joseph’s unruly behaviorwas beaten out of him, he returned to the UK haunted by a vulnerability born ofhis Nigerian experience and the loss of his mother. His experience not only con-firmed his fear and apprehension regarding life in Nigeria, impressions thatwere initially generated by the media, but it also left him with a tangiblehatred of and deep anxiety toward the country and the region, and indeed a mis-trust of people generally. Still, his plans to continue studying and to combinebusiness with art highlight the sense of focus and ambition that he nowpossesses.

C O N C L U D I N G R EMA R K S

In highlighting the transnational nature of British Nigerians’ lives, we must beattentive to the relationship between “historical experience, structural conditions,”




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and the cultural and social milieu that these people move between, in this casebetween Nigeria and the UK (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992:8). African elites have a long history of sending their children to the UK for edu-cation. Similarly, some first- and second-generation British Nigerians’ parentswere sent to boarding school in Nigeria while they lived there in their youth.The decision to send children back to Nigeria for education must be understoodwithin the larger structural context of global capitalism, as well as in relation tothe cultural and ideological circumstances of the UK and Nigeria, respectively.

We have argued that the choice to send the children and the practices andperformances this choice entails on the part of the children do a number of dif-ferent things. They serve to disturb and contest taken-for-granted notions abouteducation in Nigeria that are rooted in global geographies of power, while alsogenerating counter-narratives about Nigerian education, society, and economy.In addition, analysis of this movement problematizes assumptions, and extendsour thinking, about spatial and temporal configurations of progress and moder-nity in relation to educational migration. It does this in two key respects: First, itprovincializes the UK and forces us to rethink “the center” and resituate it “inits complex web of colonial interconnections” (Nash 2002: 222) and in the newgeography of centrality of global cities that underpins neoliberal globalization.Second, it compels us to question analytical distinctions between mobile pro-fessionals and transnational elites, and migrants and diasporans. British Niger-ians are members of both of these categories and make their choices aboutwhere to educate their children within an international education marketplace.

Moreover, Nigeria takes on a transformative capacity: circular mobilitybetween London and Lagos generates new and translocal subjectivities. Theprocess involves engaging in a project of the self by dismantling parts of theself—a central aspect of the process of self-making—and also by beingremade as one develops particular cultural dispositions and skills. SomeBritish Nigerian parents endeavor to turn their children into good subjects:they seek to rescue them from an educational, social, and moral quagmireand to equip them with the training, discipline, independence, and cultural dis-positions and knowledge they feel they can more readily attain in Nigeria. Thisis not just a moral and cultural project. It is also an act of social positioning, anincremental process through which children are fashioned into neoliberal sub-jects—independent, autonomous, competitive, ambitious, self-regulating, self-inventive, and so forth—in the (re)production of middle-class subjectivities andthe pursuit of successful futures in the UK, Nigeria, and elsewhere. The chil-dren are socialized to possess values and skills that will allow them to moveand operate at ease within a number of different settings (see Coe and Shani2015: 563).

We have seen that this process is, above all, a collective endeavor thatdemands compliance and a degree of willingness on the part of the child(Joseph being a striking exception). Children are used as a symbolic space




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where concerns and unease about British society and the educational systemcan be addressed: the relationship of Nigerian migrants with Britain is a contra-dictory one that highlights their “ambivalent situatedness” (Arndt 2009:107–8). They make choices within an international, educational marketplace, travelling back and forth between London and Lagos, affirming andcultivating networks, and pursuing social and material objectives in both coun-tries. At the same time, they draw on disciplinary practices rooted in the civi-lizing mission of British colonial modernity. Just as the Olu girls are accordedstatus in Nigeria because of their Britishness, in a similar vein education inNigeria remains rooted in an epistemological hierarchy in which Europeanknowledge, values, and educational practices and systems are privileged overindigenous ones (Nyamnjoh 2012: 129). Consequently, the choice to sendone’s children to school in Nigeria, while it challenges global geographies ofpower, also illuminates the continued relevance of the colonial educationallegacy. That legacy, with its disciplinary strategies and epistemological hierar-chies, remains, in turn, part of the project of modernity itself.

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Abstract: West Africans have a long history of investing in their children’s edu-cation by sending them to Britain. Yet, some young British-Nigerians are beingsent to Nigeria for secondary education, going against a long historical grain.The movement of children from London to Nigeria is about the making ofgood subjects who possess particular cultural dispositions and behave in such amanner as to ensure educational success and the reproduction of middle-classsubjectivities within neoliberal globalization. We maintain that this movementhighlights the way in which global geographies of power—rooted in a colony-metropole divide—are being challenged and reconfigured, serving to provincial-ize the UK, through the educational choices that Nigerian parents make for theirchildren. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies and particular spatial andtemporal configurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial sub-jects have traveled to the metropole for education, while generating counter-narratives about Nigerian education, society, and economy. Yet, the methodsused to instill new dispositions and habits in the contemporary Nigerian educa-tional context are informed by the British educational colonial legacy of disci-pline through corporal punishment—physical punishment was central to thecivilizing mission of British colonial educational policy. Consequently, thechoice to send children to school in Nigeria and other African countries both chal-lenges global geographies of power and illuminates the continued relevance ofthe colonial educational legacy and its disciplinary strategies, which are, inturn, part of the broader project of modernity itself.

Key words: West Africa, Nigeria, migration, transnationalism, global geogra-phies, children, education, United Kingdom, middle-class subjectivities,neoliberalism




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